


London Bridge is Falling Down

by Sheepnamedpig



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Abuse, Canonical Character Death (Sherlock), Gen, Grieving, Guilt, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Reichenbach, Violence, blame, stages of grief
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-23
Updated: 2012-07-23
Packaged: 2017-11-10 13:19:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/466739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheepnamedpig/pseuds/Sheepnamedpig
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Please,” Mycroft repeats.</p>
<p>John's knuckles are smarting before he even realizes what he's done.</p>
            </blockquote>





	London Bridge is Falling Down

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt: John takes out the anger stage of his grief on Mycroft and Mycroft takes it as a punishment he believes he deserves.
> 
> Unbeta'd

Mycroft turns up at the flat a few days after the funeral. John, just back from a walk, turns on his heel and goes back down the stairs.

“John,” Mycroft calls. “Wait.”

John stops but doesn't look back at Mycroft. “I expect you to be gone by the time I get back,” he snarls. He takes the stairs two at a time on his way out. When he gets back, the flat is empty.

Mycroft comes back a few days later. John is staring at Sherlock's violin and doesn't bother looking up when he says, “Get out.” Mycroft hesitates, but goes.

By the time Mycroft shows up again a few days after that, John has pretty much figured out what it is he's after. He's also determined not to give in.

“John,” he says.

John just picks up his coat and exits the flat, leaving Mycroft ignored on the landing.

Mycroft continues to appear at the flat, regular as clockwork, and John continues to avoid him. He knows what Mycroft wants, knows exactly why he wants it, and is too furious, too steeped in grief to even think of humouring him.

John finally breaks one day, one inauspicious day. Mycroft comes around, but John already has his coat in hand, is pulling it up over his shoulders.

“John,” Mycroft says. “Please.”

Please. _Please_. John's hands clench into fists on the lapels of his coat, but he lets them go and smooths them down. Fuck Mycroft. Fuck Mycroft and his 'please' and his cars and his goddamned _umbrella_.

“Please,” Mycroft repeats.

John's knuckles are smarting before he even realizes what he's done. Mycroft stumbles hard, dropping his umbrella, but he straightens up again, the red mark from John's left hook already shockingly dark against the pale skin of his face. John gives in, goes at Mycroft with his fists with precision that would've done the SAS proud and cruelty that would've inspired the Marquis de Sade himself.

John Watson and Mycroft Holmes share a secret. The secret is that they both know that one man is responsible for Sherlock Holmes' death, and that that man is Mycroft Holmes himself. Aside from John Watson, there is no living person in the world who can lay the blame where it belongs, who knows which person deserves to be hated and reviled, to be punished for Sherlock Holmes' fall and suicide. Aside from John Watson, nobody knows that Mycroft Holmes is guilty, guilty, _guilty_. In the eyes of all the world, Mycroft Holmes is innocent, but in John Watson's eyes are the truth. In John Watson's rage is the punishment he deserves.

John only stops beating Mycroft when his arms get too tired to hit and his legs get too tired to kick; barely two years out of the army and already he's this out of shape. On the floor, Mycroft is a limp mass of pain, his face bruised and bloody and swelling but his eyes alert and awake. John had been very careful to avoid giving Mycroft a concussion or causing a dangerous amount of internal damage. When John goes to the bathroom to dress his split knuckles, Mycroft is still lying there, but by the time he's got them cleaned and bandaged, the man is gone, no sign that he'd been there but for the scuff marks on the floor and a few stray drops of blood.

John goes upstairs and collapses on his bed. Taking out his anger on Mycroft doesn't made him feel any better. Worse in fact, because he split his knuckles hitting Mycroft bare-handed, but at least the exertion tired him out. John sleeps through the evening and night and wakes early the next morning feeling groggy and just as bad as ever.

Mycroft doesn't come around the next day, nor the next few after that. John just feels relieved. He's sick of looking at Mycroft, Mycroft whose spectacular cock-up resulted in Sherlock's death.

But the day after that, Mycroft shows up again, and just the sight of him, bruised and swollen and as impeccably dressed as ever, is enough to set John off. Mycroft doesn't even have time to set down his umbrella before John is slamming a fist into his solar plexus. John doesn't last as long, that second time. His still-healing knuckles split back open and while he goes to re-dress them, Mycroft picks himself up off the floor and leaves just as quietly as before.

The cycle continues. Every five or six days Mycroft shows up at the flat, lets John beat him black, blue, and broken.  After that first time, John never strikes Mycroft's face again. It's too obvious, though John has no doubts that Mycroft would willingly bear the bruises anyway. John runs out of antiseptic cream and has to buy a fresh tube to treat his perpetually bloody knuckles.

They're coming up on the one month anniversary of their little ritual when something finally gives.

John abruptly runs out of steam mid-beating. He slumps against the wall and slides down it, landing with a thump at the base. He's done. He's out of anger, out of rage, out of hate, out of whatever dark festering emotions were fuelling his attacks on a man who accepted each hit in absolute silence. It's been two months since the funeral and John is finally done hurting.

He feels twice his age when he clambers to his feet, sore in his muscles and achy in his joints. He helps Mycroft to his feet with careful, gentle hands, and they shuffle through the kitchen and down the hall to Sherlock's bedroom.

“Take off your clothes,” John says. “All of them.”

When he gets back with the first aid kit and a wrapped ice pack, Mycroft is fully nude and staring at the neatly made bed. He's probably expecting John to rape him on it, and wouldn't that be a thoroughly horrific irony. John catalogues the rainbow of bruises that stretch over his shoulders, back, and arms, down his buttocks and thighs and even darkening his calves. It's probably just as bad on the front; John can be very thorough when he puts his mind to it.

He finds an unblemished patch of skin between Mycroft's shoulders and nudges him toward the bed.

“Lay down.”

Mycroft arranges himself on the bed. His torso is a solid sheet of black and blue. John is going to need more ice and few more tubes of arnica gel. At least he has plenty of Paracetamol from all the headaches that Sherlock used to give him and Mrs. Hudson.

John decides to save himself the effort of nicking Mrs. Hudson's ice trays and scrounges up a few flannels, soaking them in ice water and laying them over the extensive bruising on Mycroft's chest. He palpates the ribs, four broken and three fractured, and feeds him some paracetamol, making a mental note to pick up some broth or something from the shop. Mycroft is within the normal weight range, but is also well below his usual. If Sherlock were still alive, he'd probably be appalled.

“I thought only teenage girls bothered with eating disorders,” he might say, and then he'd make some crack about Mycroft being a teenage girl and John would turn his head away and bite back giggles and Mycroft would get that look of long-suffering annoyance and feign maturity by changing the subject. The thought almost makes John smile.

John refreshes the flannels, moving them to Mycroft's arms and abdomen before breaking out the tube of arnica gel. He makes himself comfortable on the bed and begins the task of carefully rubbing the gel into the chilled patches of bruising. It becomes an alternating pattern: fifteen minutes under the cold flannels, then a layer of gel while the flannels chill some other part of Mycroft's body. Mrs. Hudson, bless her timing, fetches a few more tubes of gel just as he's running out and brings up her ice trays and never asks why.

Mycroft watches him incessantly. John doesn't care.

It's full dark outside by the time John gets Mycroft's front and back done. He stands up and stretches, cramped from hours spent hunched over Mycroft's prone body.

“I'm going to go put the kettle on and scrounge us up something to eat. Meanwhile,” he passes Mycroft his mobile, “you call whoever needs to be called and tell them you're taking a few days off. The loo is right next door if you need it.”

Mycroft emerges from Sherlock's bedroom while John is heating up some soup from a can. He's still completely nude and absolutely reeks of arnica, but it's colder in the sitting room, so he leaves Mycroft to watch the soup and drink tea while he goes into Sherlock's room and digs out the thickest dressing gown. Sherlock detested it while he was alive and he sure as hell isn't going to get any use out of it now that he's dead, so John might as well put it to good use.

Supper is eaten in silence. Mycroft stares down at his bowl, looking much less vulnerable now that he's clothed, but every now and then his sleeve or collar will gape open and reveal the dark shadow of a bruise. John thinks he should feel guilty but he doesn't, not really.

After supper it's back to Sherlock's room with fresh ice water and John lays the cold flannels over Mycroft's bruises again. He doesn't bother with the gel this time, occupying himself in between changing the flannels by hunting down a pair of pyjamas that will fit Mycroft, swapping out the damp and arnica-stained bedsheets for fresh sheets, and finally seeing to the damage on his own hands.

It's late by the time Mycroft is tucked into bed and John is exhausted, but he lingers, sitting on the edge of the bed. Mycroft watches him still, probably even more exhausted but just as keen as ever.

“I'm not going to beat you anymore,” he says into the silence. “Bloody hell, I'm not even angry at you anymore.” He turns to face Mycroft and looks him dead in the eye. “I forgive you, Mycroft Holmes.”

Mycroft looks away, aiming his thousand yard stare at the far wall.

“I know that's not what you want, but what you want isn't going to make you feel better. Nothing will,” he says quietly, “Not until you forgive _yourself_.”

Mycroft's eyes close, as clear a dismissal as if he'd said it aloud. John stands up and turns out the lights as he leaves. The flat is quiet and he sleeps deeply and dreamlessly and wakes the next morning refreshed and alert.

He sneaks into Mycroft's room with a tray of tea and jam on toast and climbs gently onto the bed next to where Mycroft is still sound asleep. Sitting up against the headboard, he cracks open the journals he'd been neglecting and whiles away the morning catching up on the latest medical research.

John is skimming an article on breast cancer and thinking about lunch when Mycroft murmurs, “I don't know if I can.”

John blinks down at him for a few uncomprehending seconds before remembering what he'd said to Mycroft the night before.

“I'll help you,” John says.

Mycroft gives him a long, slow look. “Why?”

John shrugs. He doesn't know. Sherlock might put it down to John's instinctive need to protect and heal. His psychiatrist might say that it's a form of atonement, a way to relieve the guilt she would say that he feels. Harry might snipe that it's John being a contrary bastard. All he knows is that the agony that followed Sherlock's death is gone and that he's finally ready to climb free of the rut he has fallen into. Helping Mycroft just seems like a good way to do that.

“I'll tell you when I figure it out,” John says. “Until then, more ice, ointment, and bed rest.”

Mycroft's blank expression goes familiarly long-suffering and John lets a wan smile tug at the edge of his mouth.

They end up having a quiet lunch first, John scrounging up whatever he can find while Mycroft uses the loo and gazes longingly at the bath, then it's back to Sherlock's room where Mycroft strips off his borrowed robe and settles carefully on the towels laid out on the bed.

The silence between them is a little less oppressive, a little more relaxed. It's easier to break when John, gently rubbing the gel into the skin over one of Mycroft's cracked ribs, remembers a question he'd been meaning to ask Mycroft since the conclusion of the whole débâcle with Irene Adler.

“What made Sherlock want to be a pirate?” he asks.

Mycroft doesn't twitch or tense up or even blink, but the quality of his silence changes, becomes tense and uncomfortable.

“It's just,” he continues, “I can't figure out what on earth would make someone like _Sherlock_ want to be a _pirate_ , of all things. One would think he'd play at being an amateur chemist, or a doctor, or something like that. So why a pirate?”

Mycroft doesn't offer a reply until John is rubbing gel into a yellowing bruise on Mycroft's inner thigh.

“He-” Mycroft swallows hard and John steadfastly keeps his strokes smooth and professional.

“He wanted to find mermaids,” Mycroft whispers harshly. “He was adamant that mermaids existed and he'd somehow gotten the notion into his head that you had to be a pirate to find mermaids.”

“Did he believe in Santa Claus, too?” John continues smoothly.

“No, never.”

“The Easter Bunny?”

“No.” Mycroft's voice cracks on the single syllable.

John glances up at Mycroft, whose eyes are tightly shut. “I guess you didn't go on Easter egg hunts then?”

“We did, actually. Sherlock was always very competitive, even as a child, and insisted that we go every year so he could outdo all the other children.”

“A show off, even then,” John huffs. “I'm not surprised.”

“After the first to years that Sherlock attended, the organisers realized that Sherlock never bothered with the obvious ones and was too short to get the ones placed high up, so they started putting all the eggs in the easiest hiding spots or up too high for him to reach them.”

“What did he do then?”

“He started dragging me around, insisting that I pick him up or carry him on my shoulders so that he could reach the high ones. He always got frustrated with me because he would run back and forth between where he knew the eggs were hidden and I refused to go any faster than a sedate walk. I had to carry his basket too, because he was only ever interested in finding the eggs and would forget about them the moment he'd gotten his grubby little hands on them. And then he'd never eat the candy, so we always ended up giving it away.”

“How old was he when he decided he was too old to do the egg hunts?” John prompts.

“Ten. I remember, the day after his tenth birthday he got the three of us together on the sofa and declared to us that he was officially too old to 'participate in Easter festivities'. His exact words. The egg hunt organisers were undoubtedly relieved to hear the news.”

“I'm sure. But why did he believe in mermaids and not Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny?”

“He explained it to me once, but I never fully understood.” Mycroft launches into a chain of logic so convoluted and yet so detailed that it could only have come from the mind of a very young Sherlock Holmes himself. By the end of it, John is thoroughly perplexed.

He keeps Mycroft talking through the afternoon and evening, prompting him with questions when he slows down. Mycroft talks and talks, barely pausing for tea and supper as though trying to make up for every silent hour they'd spent over the past month. John learns all the things he'd never known about Sherlock, all the silly things he'd done and said as a child, the source of the brothers' feud, the reasons behind his downward spiral after Uni; he learns everything about Sherlock Holmes that hadn't made it into that awful, libellous article.

Mycroft's voice is a hoarse whisper by the time John gets him tucked in for bed. John extracts a promise from Mycroft to share more stories from Sherlock's apparently hilarious puberty, a verbal bookmark in the storytelling of Sherlock's tempestuous life. Mycroft's eyes drift shut and he's out even before John clicks off the lamp.

John goes upstairs to his own bedroom, rubbing the muscles of his face. They feel loose, relaxed from smiling more in the past few hours than in the whole of the two months prior. He'd startled both himself and Mycroft the first time he'd laughed at one of Mycroft's anecdotes, but as the day wore on, he could see the occasional smile pull at Mycroft's own mouth.

The third day of Mycroft's convalescence starts out much the same as the previous day ended, with Mycroft regaling John with stories from Sherlock's teenage years. His voice, still hoarse from the day before, finally gives out in the early afternoon. John picks up the narrative, transitioning seamlessly into various stories from his own time spent living with Sherlock. The eighteen months they'd been together pale in comparison with the thirty-odd years Mycroft can claim, but the man listens keenly, occasionally jumping in with a whispered comment or question. By the time they turn in, John's voice is a hoarse croak and Mycroft's is completely gone.

The next morning, Mycroft claims that his ribs are doing better, (John wonders how Mycroft managed to go about his life and job without passing out from the pain, but he doesn't actually want to ask), so John draws him a hot bath. Mycroft, thoroughly sick of sponge baths and the smell or arnica gel, sinks gratefully into the steaming water. He zones out so thoroughly as John washes his hair and back that John entertains the notion that he's actually sleeping with his eyes open.

John relocates the freshly-washed Mycroft to the sitting room while Sherlock's bedroom airs out and they spend the afternoon watching the telly and whispering imitations of what Sherlock might say in response to this show or that advert. Mycroft is spot-on every time, but John's no slouch himself. A trailer for a new Daniel Craig film comes on and John makes a thoroughly Sherlock-esque observation about Craig, Bond films, and Americans and Mycroft huffs out a breathy laugh. John smirks glances at Mycroft.

Mycroft's smile is awkward and a little goofy-looking, the creases in his cheeks diverting the lines of tears that streak down his cheeks as he blinks in surprise. John's smirk goes flat. Mycroft reaches up to his face but John reaches out and catches his wrists, watching as Mycroft's face pinches inward, crumpling in slow motion. He sobs once, twice, and John slides out of his armchair to kneel on Mycroft's, straddling his knees and gently guiding Mycroft's face into his shoulder as the older man sobs. He releases Mycroft's hands, which fall to catch and cling in the folds of John's soft jumper. Cautious of Mycroft's damaged ribs, John wraps his arms around Mycroft and rests his hands on Mycroft's heaving back. Mycroft sinks into his embrace like he's starved for it.

The next day, Mycroft says,  “I told Sherlock that caring was not an advantage.”

John considers this. “It generally isn't. Do you regret it though? Caring about Sherlock?”

Mycroft's reply comes quick and firm. “No.”

“Caring is strange in that way.”

“It is.”

Mycroft leaves the morning after that. He scowls at the tube of arnica gel John hands him, but tucks it into his coat pocket.

“How do you feel?” John asks. It's a little strange to see Mycroft wearing his three piece uniform after five days of pyjamas, dressing gowns, and nothing.

Mycroft considers his answer carefully. “Better. Thank you. You were right.”

John waves his hand dismissively. “Don't thank me. I beat you bloody for a month, then made you talk until you lost your voice twice.”

Mycroft smiles. It makes John a bit happy that he can.

“Though,” John continues, “I'm thinking of moving out. I can't be surrounded by all...this.” He gestures at the flat and Sherlock's pervasive mess. He hadn't had the heart to touch any of it for two months, but it would be incredibly rude to saddle Mrs. Hudson with it. “If you happen to hear of a place within my price range, give me a call. On my phone, please. No black cars. Don't smirk.”

Mycroft smirks. John feigns irritation.

“And when I've moved in, come and visit me.” John pauses, shrugs. “Or I'll come visit you, whichever is more convenient.”

Mycroft smiles again, gently. “I'll do that.”

“Look after that bruising and be careful with your ribs.” John holds out his hand to be shaken and Mycroft takes it and gives it a firm pump. “I'll see you later.”

“I'll see you later, John.”

Mycroft releases his hand with one last squeeze and leaves, his umbrella swinging gently from his forearm as he steps lightly down the stairs. John turns to the mess in the sitting room and pushes up the sleeves of his jumper as he formulates his plan of attack. He picks up a stack of old junk mail, grins as he remembers Sherlock's vitriolic rant about e-mail versus snail-mail, and piles them neatly on the coffee table to be thrown out with the rest of the paper recycling.

His life may have crumbled to rocks and dust when Sherlock died, but it's about time he started rebuilding.


End file.
